A literary blog for all seasons.

May 2015

05/29/2015

Bob Greene's had a bumpy career, but I always enjoyed reading him in his glory days when he wrote for Esquire as well as turning out a nationally syndicated column for the Chicago Tribune. Now, Greene writes frequently for The Wall Street Journal, and the old populist still shows a deft touch with a pleasant,amusing newspaper piece.

In Friday's Journal, the native of Bexley, Ohio, looks back on famed Ohio St. curmudgeon coach Woody Hayes, conjecturing that Hayes would not have allowed the Rolling Stones to play their concert in Buckeye Stadium, part of the band's current U.S. tour. Greene points out that Woody was a bulwark against 1960s culture and tightly controlled every aspect of the Buckeyes program. But now the Rolling Stones would be the old fogies, not Woody, Greene says at the piece's end. When the coach was forced out after 28 years for punching a Clemson player in a bowl game, he was 65, younger than the Stones, who are now in their 70s.

The piece reminded me that in the 1970s, the Stones began a U.S. tour with a concert at LSU's campus in Baton Rouge. They performed at the Pete Maravich Assembly Center, not Tiger Stadium. In those days, the PMAC frequently hosted rock concerts. I saw several shows there, including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and the Band, but not the Stones, because of some odd non-snob snobbism and loyalty to the Beatles. That Stones concert in my hometown was the subject of an essay by Frank Conroy, a more substantial writer than Greene.

I don't know if the Stones would be allowed to play Tiger Stadium, but the football palace is the site of annual Memorial Day weekend concerts featuring big country stars. Last week, Taylor Swift, now more pop than country, and Blake Shelton and Miranda Lambert performed there. I wonder how Woody would have felt about Taylor Swift.

Thinking about Greene's hometown, I have warm personal memories of Bexley and Columbus from several trips there to visit my sister-in-law and family. We attended our niece's graduation from Bexley High - she was the valedictorian - and her wedding in Columbus. There was also an odd world's fair type of event involving flowers, which our children enjoyed - they got to play in the mud. Truth be told, I enjoyed it too (not the mud), but the nationally hyped extravaganza turned out to be a bust.

As a native of Baton Rouge and LSU grad, I liked comparing the cultures of the two cities and universities. Both cities are large, prosperous state capitals with an all-American mix of party hedonism and work ethic. Both are crazy about football.

Yes, Columbus comes out ahead here, but may I point out that the last time LSU played Ohio St. in football, the Tigers won the national championship over the Buckeyes, and a Michigan man was coaching LSU.

05/28/2015

Growing up in South Louisiana, I considered Houston as a second hometown almost as much as New Orleans. The photos of the Texas flooding resemble those from New Orleans after the levees broke in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

As Rachel Maddow exhaustively explained on her show the other night, Houston is criss-crossed by bayous and is almost as low-lying as New Orleans. As with the South Louisiana city, much of Houston was built on land reclaimed from wetlands. These areas have been sinking for years.

Houston, the nation's fourth-largest city, has much more capitalistic energy than New Orleans and much less charm, but the two cities are like cousins. Many Katrina victims headed west to seek shelter at the Astrodome, bringing a condescending comment from Barbara Bush. The two cities have many economic and cultural ties.

The cow town turned global metropolis is known for its pioneer spirit, so it'll bounce back from this disaster. But long term, Houston risks turning into another Atlantis.

05/27/2015

Something must be amiss in the mail service from London: I just received yesterday the May 21 London Review, with Sy Hersh's big expose of the Osama Bin Laden killing.

Looks like a long, involved story that I probably should read. Or perhaps I'll stand pat with all of the commentary I've read in the last two weeks or so. Most of it indicated that Hersh is wrong. Suppose I should read it and judge for myself, but the New Yorkers are stacking up again.

So much for the age of instant information. This makes me feel as if I'm living in Victorian times and waiting for the next installment of a Dickens novel.

05/26/2015

Now the Band's "The Weight" in a new chirpy arrangement closes a TV commercial for some hotel chain. Other '60s rock anthems have been used in the past for commercial purposes, including some of the most lauded work of Bob Dylan and the Beatles. Corporate exploitation of '60s culture is an old story, lately given another reading on "The Mad Men" finale, but hearing "The Weight" lyrics changed to a marketing jingle still stung.

With three of the Band members now dead, I suppose Robbie Robertson was the one who agreed to the commercial deal. The group's keyboard genius, Garth Hudson, is still making music. But Hudson probably doesn't have any rights to "The Weight," since he never received songwriting credit for any of the Band's songs, although he probably should have for "Chest Fever" and others.

I can't imagine the late Levon Helm would be happy. Helm contributed some of "The Weight's" most powerful images, and his timeless elegiac voice gave the song the majesty of a great poem.

05/25/2015

I've read many of Harold Bloom's bromides, and even purchased his book on Shakespeare. More and more I see him as a literary con man, writing for a middlebrow audience that wants to gain knowledge about literature without actually reading the books. That wouldn't be so bad, if Bloom's eccentric and malicious views weren't swallowed by gullible readers without broad enough knowledge to judge his pronouncements' validity.

All too predictably, the Sunday New York Times Book Review gave Bloom's new windy opus a front page review, written by Cynthia Ozick, that New York intellectual out of central casting. Cynthia spewed forth her usual critic-speak, which quickly sickened me. Bloom's new book apparently recycles his old bombast on "Famous Writers," this time those of the American variety, predominantly white male of course, with another clever trope about "the Daemon" that supposedly inspired each of them.

Harold Bloom early in his career introduced several seminal ideas of major importance for literary criticism. More and more, though, he's a malignant influence. The Times could have assigned the review of Bloom's book to someone more critical of his work than Ozick. but that would have taken more imagination and independence than the Times possesses.

05/22/2015

Before reading reports of ISIS taking over Palmyra, I'd never heard of the Syrian city in the desert or its ancient ruins. Now, I'm worried that the barbaric Islamists will destroy the site.

I always liked David Letterman, but all of the farewells and testimonials grew excessive. Was a talk show host really such a major cultural figure?

Same with "Mad Men," which drew only 3.5 million for its finale. Never has more bad writing been done about a show with so little popularity.

My favorite story of the week: Archaeologists discovered that tool making began 700,000 years earlier than previously thought, even before the advent of human beings. Our little primate ancestors figured out how to use one stone to chip a sharp edge on another stone.

05/20/2015

In my efforts to declutter, I found an old Antioch Review on a bookshelf, as well as a Kenyon Review. The Antioch Review called Jorie Graham one of America's best young poets, and had an interview and essay by Larry Levis, who died in 1996, and, surprisingly, a short story by the late Philip Levine, mainly known as a poet.

The Kenyon Review had a jewel from a writer now dead many years - Andre Dubus. Dubus' offering was a meandering essay on Hemingway's great story, "In Another Country," which included a memory of he and Kurt Vonnegut at the Iowa Writers Conference, picking up Ralph Ellison at the airport. The piece brought echoes of a fine memoir I read by Dubus' son, Andre Dubus III.

Old literary magazines are artifacts of a vanishing culture. They are full of obscure poems and stories, some by poets and writers now well-known, others by authors now forgotten.

A few months ago, I tossed out years of New Yorkers in the recycling bin. I've also thrown out New Criterions. But somehow, I must keep the Antioch and Kenyon Reviews.

Postscript: I thought both Antioch College and the Antioch Review were both defunct, but a Google search reveals they're still alive.

05/19/2015

Cesar Vallejo's "Black Stone on Top of a White Stone" jolted me when I first read it in one of my favorite poetry anthologies, "99 Poems in Translation, edited by the late playwright Harold Pinter along with Anthony Astbury and Geoffrey Godbert and published by their Greyville Press in association with Faber & Faber.

Over the years, I've read other versions of "Black Stone on Top of a White Stone," and found its power diminishing. Looking back at the Greyville Press version, translated by the Trappist monk, poet and essayist Thomas Merton, I had an insight as to why.

A passage in Merton's version says "As I put down these lines, I have set my shoulders/To the evil..." Other versions I have read in recent years, including one spoken by Garrison Keillor on his "Writers' Almanac," say something like "I have placed my upper shoulder bones on wrong." Others say "my humerus." The rest of the poem is pretty much the same.

I don't know if Vallejo wrote two versions of the poem, one explicitly seeing a struggle against evil, whether a personal shortcoming or some injustice in society, and the other using the macabre/funny shoulder bone image, or if the translations differ widely. I like them both versions, but the one referring "to the evil" hits me deeper.

Here's Merton's translation.

Black Stone on Top of a White Stone

Cesar Vallejo (1892-1938)

I shall die in Paris, in a rainstorm,On a day I already remember.I shall die in Paris - it does not bother me -Doubtless on a Thursday, like today, in autumn.

It shall be a Thursday, because today, ThursdayAs I put down these lines, I have set my shouldersTo the evil. Never like today have I turned,And headed my whole journey to the ways where I am alone.

Cesar Vallejo is dead. They struck him,All of them, though he did nothing to them.They hit him hard with a stick and hard alsoWith the end of a rope. Witnesses are: the Thursdays,The shoulder bones, the loneliness, the rain and the roads...

05/18/2015

Joseph Mitchell acolytes are upset that the revered New Yorker writer created composite characters for several of his most memorable pieces, which readers believed were true accounts rather than fiction.

Thomas Kunkel in his recent biography of Mitchell found for example that Mitchell used several different old men who hung around the Fulton Fish Market to forge the single character Mr. Flood in two of his most lauded pieces. Mitchell admitted to his readers that Mr. Flood was the author's invention when the pieces were included in Mitchell's first collection. Another Kunkel finding that has stirred anguish for Mitchell lovers is that much of his characters' vivid dialogue was invented.

What surprised me in reading Kunkel's book is that New Yorker editor Harold Ross approved Mitchell's use of composites and may have even suggested creating one for Mr. Flood. While Mitchell lovers are dismayed about his misleading technique, I haven't read of any consternation about Ross' role.

Ross, who envisioned the New Yorker as a light humor magazine for the metropolis' smart set, was charicatured as a sort of idiot savant in James Thurber's very funny memoir, "The Years With Ross." The editor's reputation has soared over the years, in large part from Kunkel's more complex portrait in his biography of Ross. Rather than a crude hayseed who out of some kind of puncher's luck created one of the world's most sophisticated magazines, Ross is now considered a protean, discerning editor. Yes, the old Ross was an exaggerated comic character created by James Thurber.

So far, the dismay over Kunkel's revelations has not extended to Ross. As for Mitchell, I'm not that bothered by the revelations that he created composites, perhaps because I all too often find his New Yorker work labored and stilted.

To me, that the memorable Mr. Flood was stitched together from several different personalities doesn't detract from Mitchell's accomplishment. That was more of an accepted practice at the time, and Flood is not a historical person for whom a higher standard of truth would be expected.

Even our expectations for historic accounts are fluid. Boswell wrote a classic portrait of Samiel Johnson, and we assume that Boswell accurately renders Johnson's personality and conversation. But did he embellish some scenes or re-create conversations to create a character we know as Dr. Johnson?

Mitchell's an endearing writer, who remained conflicted by a desire to write a novelistic portrait of New York City. He was also torn by memories of his rural North Carolina childhood. After a second portrait of his alter ego Joe Gould, an all too real person, Mitchell spent years working at the New Yorker without producing another piece for the magazine. Gould was reportedly working on his own history of New York's Greenwich Village, but Mitchell found that Gould's piece never existed. Somehow, Mitchell subsumed Gould's failure.

But Kunkel also disclosed that Mitchell kept writing through all of those years. Kunkel uncovered several parts of a memoir, including Mitchell's North Carolina childhood and his love of walking through New York City. The New Yorker in recent years has published several of those pieces, which range from masterly to shockingly verbose.

Reading these pieces is heartbreaking. They show that Mitchell's creative divisions at last overwhelmed him, ruining a writer who might have developed into one of our finest novelists.

05/15/2015

Robert Lowell's "Ford Madox Ford" remains one of my favorite poems after years of rereading. The poem, with its amusing vignette of Ford playing golf with David Lloyd George, evokes the sunny European civilization smashed by World War I. Ford comes to life on the page. I must have been in my 20s when I first encountered Lowell's "Life Studies," still my No. 1 collection. However, I wish Lowell would have cut the first line of his poem to Delmore Schwartz.

...Nothing like a few William Logan reviews to ease an insomnia bout. A few years ago, I'd downloaded a Logan volume to my e-reader, but never got around to reading it until waking recently at 3 a.m. and finding myself unable to go back to sleep. Logan in a couple of essays, including an insightful review of Lowell's letters to Elizabeth Bishop, upholds Lowell's reputation, so maligned by that literary hit man Harold Bloom.

....Newspaper critics, especially you New York Times wretches, please banish the word "indelible" from your word list.

...Farewell, B.B. King. I wasn't a big fan of his, but he was one of America's music masters. Also sad to hear about the death of Franz Wright, whose agonizing poems attracted and repelled me. Like his father, James Wright, Franz died of cancer.